19 January 2015 12:45 PM

I’m watching with interest the largely positive reviews which Johann Hari’s new book on drugs ('Chasing the Scream')is collecting, compared with the near-universal silence (tempered with personal abuse) which my own rather different book (‘The War We Never Fought’) on the same subject received.

I’m due to discuss it with him at the Hay Festival in May (this event, the funky Glastonbury of the book world, two years ago invited me to discuss my book, then abruptly disinvited me. It'll be nice to get in again, even if I only do so in Mr Hari's baggage rather than in my own right.).

I’m actually quite glad to see Mr Hari’s success. I’ve never disliked him, have always found him charming in person, and regarded his terrible fall from grace (over plagiarism and various other misdeeds) as a sad and embarrassing matter rather than an opportunity to say rude things about him

But I do think the comparison between the treatment of the two books is telling. They share the same publisher, are about the same very interesting and current subject, and in both cases the author is reasonably prominent but not especially beloved.

Even more fascinating is the fact that Mr Hari comes very close indeed to committing the same heresy which I commit, to howls of execration – suggesting that ‘addiction’, as a physical phenomenon, does not in fact exist. In fact, he may actually commit it. See for yourselves what you think. But there are no howls, there is no execration, for him.

Mr Hari has kindly sent me a copy of his book as published (until now I was working from proofs which of course are not final or definitive).

The first thing I checked was a passage beginning on page 170. This is in a chapter about Bruce Alexander, a Canadian academic .

Now read on

‘There were big chunks of time in the 1970s in which the Canadian police managed to blockade the port of Vancouver so successfully that no heroin was getting into the city at all. We know this because the police tested the “heroin” being sold on the streets and found it actually contained zero percent of the drug.: it was all filler and contaminants. So the war on drugs was, for some significant stretches being won here.

‘It is obvious what should have happened during these heroin droughts. The heroin addicts should all have been plunged into physical withdrawal, writhing in agony, and then, weeks later they should have woken up to find they were freed from their physical dependency.

‘But Bruce was seeing something really weird instead. There was no heroin in the city – but all the heroin addicts were carrying on almost exactly as before. They were still scrambling desperately to raise the money – robbing or prostituting – to buy this empty cocktail. They weren’t in agonizing withdrawal. They weren’t getting gut-wrenchingly sick. They thought the “heroin” they were buying was weak, to be sure, and they were topping it up with heavier drinking or more Valium. But the core of their addiction didn’t seem to be affected. Nothing had changed’.

Mr Hari goes to state that this was not a freak event but was replicated in several American cities.

He goes on ‘Bruce saw addicts in withdrawal all the time - and their symptoms were often minor: at worst, like a bad flu. This is so contrary to what we are told that it seems impossible, but doctors now very broadly agree it is the case. The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.’

Of course, it’s partly because it’s padded with undisproveable, unproveable psychobabble like that last sentence that Mr Hari can get away with this . The facts he recounts here are almost identical to what Theodore Dalyrmple, the former English prison doctor, has said about ‘withdrawal’. And it is indeed ‘contrary to all we are told’ especially in films such as ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘French Connection 2’.

Well, could that be because ‘everything we are told’,is in fact twaddle, widely believed by people who want to believe it and have never examined the matter because, thanks to conventional wisdom, they think they know something they don't?

Mr Hari goes on (p.171) to quote the medical researchers John Ball and Carl Chambers who, he says, studied medical literature from 1875 to 1968, and found that nobody had died from heroin withdrawal *alone* in that time. ‘The only people who are killed by withdrawal’’, Mr Hari says ‘ are people who are already very weak’.

There’s a brief diversion after this about an experiment called ‘rat park’ which suggests that heroin abuse has more to do with unhappiness than physical compulsion, which you can take or leave depending on how similar you think humans are to rats, and whether rats feel,’ unhappiness’ in a way that is remotely comparable to human emotions.

If we leave such concepts as ‘happiness’ out of the calculation and concede (which is obvious) that euphoria-inducing drugs are bound to appeal to some (but not all) people who cannot physically escape from unpleasant, unwanted circumstances; and if you accept that the fact they are bound to appeal does not in any way mean that the decision to take such drugs is anything other than a matter of voluntary choice which some may view as wrong and immoral, …

…in that case, there’s some very interesting material on page 173 of Mr Hari’s book..

According to research cited by Mr Hari, from ‘The Archives of General Pyschiatry’, some 20 per cent of US soldiers serving in Vietnam (where, you will recall, they were almost all conscripts) had ‘become addicted to’ heroin while there.

The study showed that 95% of these men had stopped using heroin within a year of returning home. ’Treatment’ and ‘rehabilitation’ made no difference to this outcome.

As Mr Hari writes ‘If you believe the theory that drugs hijack your brain and turn you into a chemical slave – the theory on which the war on drugs has been based since [Harry] Anslinger [head of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the 1930s, cited by Mr Hari as one of the originators of the war on drugs’]- then this makes no sense’.

Indeed it doesn’t, and I have frequent disputes with my allies in the anti-legalisation movement, about their too ready and ultimately self-weakening acceptance of the concept of ‘addiction’. I think the use of the term by drug opponents is lazy, contradictory and morally confusing and eventually puts them in a false position. That’s why I’d rather risk the opprobrium and abuse that comes my way for agreeing with Mr Hari that the classic concept of ‘addiction’ is logically and scientifically untenable.

My conclusions from this are quite different from his. He excuses drugtaking as a response to bad conditions and so rejects the punishment of possession . But that is because our fundamental moral positions are opposed. This argument has always been far more about morals than about anything else. And what Mr Hari has written in his book makes that even plainer. I wonder why his sympathetic reviewers who(unsurprisingly) tend to be in favur of relaxing the drug laws, haven't fastened on this passage, as they would undoubtedly have done had I written it.

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20 October 2013 12:17 AM

Egalitarian spite has already wrecked
or destroyed quite enough good things. Hundreds of grammar schools, the
House of Lords, intelligent programmes on TV and radio, have all been
sacrificed to the hungry, angry idol of ‘equality’.

And
now the Royal Train is next. It’s obvious that when it comes up for
replacement, the sneering voices of sour resentment will be raised in
bitter protest. There’ll be a sentimental final trip, and then the
knacker’s yard.

The
same thing happened to the Royal Yacht, mainly because the spineless
Tory Party didn’t dare to replace or refurbish it in time.

The steam locomotive Tornado pulling the
Royal Train. Peter Hitchens says 'spite and envy will drive the Royal
Train into the buffers'

The arguments against the train are
feeble. Its cost is probably smaller than the price of several things
we’d be better off without. How about the methadone programme, for which
George Osborne mugs the taxpayer of nearly £300 million each year, on
behalf of criminal heroin abusers?

To
call this activity ‘worthless’ would be too kind. A pharmacist wrote to
me this week to describe it in operation: ‘We see the same persons year
in, year out with no apparent change to their regimen.

‘These
people are often aggressive, high on drugs, and see the secondary
purpose of their visit as stealing as much stuff off the shelves as they
can get away with.

‘I
have seen with my own eyes addicts rolling around fighting on the
pharmacy floor over a 50ml bottle of methadone, and seen them rush out
of the shop to a waiting car to spit the methadone into a friend’s
mouth.’

I have a
feeling that a replacement Royal Train, perhaps equipped with a fine
new British-built steam locomotive, like the recently constructed
Tornado, would come in a good deal cheaper than that, to build or to
run. But it would give dignity to the monarch and pleasure to the
people. And we can’t have that in Equality and Diversity Britain.

Maybe
things might be different if it were a Prime Ministerial Train. Like
all supposed egalitarians, our politicians long to usurp the dignity of
the Crown, and yearn for its popularity and status.

The
grandest and most exclusive personal trains ever built were provided
for Communist Mr Bigs. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito had a splendid one.

The Kremlin’s Khrushchev liked having
six carriages to himself, preceded by a three-carriage pilot train
crammed with secret police. North Korea still maintains a mighty
armoured train for the Leader.

Leftists certainly don’t have any personal objections to such things themselves.

Cherie Blair once quietly used the Queen’s train to host a trip for the wives of visiting leaders at some summit.

One
day I’ll be able to describe how my attempts to break this story (in
another newspaper) were hampered, once Downing Street realised how
damaging it would be if it were prominently used.

It
did get out, elsewhere, much later and in a less damaging place. But it
was plain that the Blair machine grasped that the journey had been a
serious mistake. It was still too soon for them to be so obvious about
their revolutionary, republican intentions.

It will probably still be too soon, ten years hence, when the train goes to the breakers.

But our Leftist elite reckon that, if they can’t have palaces, trains and yachts, nor can anyone else.

And
the ill-named Conservative Party is too scared of the BBC and the
Guardian to defend such things. So get ready to say goodbye to another
bit of a better Britain.

Cate Blanchett as Jasmine in the film Blue Jasmine

I can take or leave Woody
Allen. He was a bit funny, a long time ago, and all his later films
strike me as over-praised and pretentious.

So
please believe me when I say that Cate Blanchett’s performance in Blue
Jasmine (Allen’s latest film) is so superlative that it is almost your
duty to see it.

The
rest of the cast are great, too, but this account of a human being who
has fallen off the edge of the moral universe is as close as we can get
to Shakespeare in modern drama.

The
black truth that lies beneath our flashy modern lives, that the breach
of the marriage vow leads all too often to madness and death, has seldom
been more graphically shown.

Our police: Guilty as charged

Some
weeks ago, I dared to criticise the police here. I did not apologise
for doing so, nor hedge my attack on this failed, complacent
nationalised industry by saying that most officers were wonderful.

No
doubt some are, but I hardly ever see any of them, so how would I know?
The response from many officers was coarse abuse, always a sign of a
weak case.

Now it grows
clearer and clearer that the disgraceful treatment of Andrew Mitchell
went far wider than a rogue constable or two, so much so that the Home
Secretary and the Prime Minister have taken the unprecedented step of
publicly criticising the police.

The
police have been protected far too long by a reputation they no longer
deserve. The time has come for deep, searching reform, as I have been
urging for years.

Let us hope we get it right this time.

Splendid
news from Northern Ireland where the Church of Ireland is flatly
refusing to accept the new God-free promise introduced by the Girl
Guides.

They are demanding that girls be given the option of promising to serve God, as before.

This
is a moving example to the rest of us on the mainland – especially
poignant as it comes from a part of the country our Government has
betrayed and wants to get rid of.

In
a free country, how can anyone be compelled to permit children in their
care to be given an injection? Come to that, how can the children
involved, quite old enough to have wills of their own, be forced to
undergo it?

Will they
be held down, or strapped, struggling, to chairs? Will police and social
workers enforce this strange, un-British judgment? What sort of nurse
or doctor would take part in such a grotesque scene?

I know some arrogant, intolerant totalitarians think the MMR jab is a social duty, but this isn’t (yet) a People’s Republic.

Or is it?

It is the sober truth that David
Howard, an aide to the mayor of Washington DC, was forced to resign from
his job in 1999 for using the word ‘niggardly’ about a budget.

He
was later reinstated, but only after a public fuss. Nobody is safe from
the wild witch-hunting hysteria of modern political correctness, even a
popular football manager.

Meanwhile,
there is almost no controversy about the chanting, by Polish fans at
Tuesday’s match, of the words ‘We are Poland. We’re playing at home’.
That’s because it’s true, and because it was them chanting it.

If you want to comment on Peter
Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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22 June 2013 12:42 PM

Mr Godfrey asks :’ Mr Hitchens wrote: 'As this is fundamentally a religious question, one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit.' How is that an argument? Surely reality is not changed by human whim? Either something is true or it is not, this must be the case for 'religious questions'.

**My reply. It is not an argument so much as an acceptance that there are several questions which cannot be answered by logic and scientific enquiry. And yet we know that much depends on the answer. They are, at base, the same argument as the God argument. And they take us to to the same point, where we choose the belief we desire. I just think this is straightforward honesty. Anyone can ask me why I believe what I believe, and I will tell them.

But what makes this a dead-end argument is the insoluble difficulty - that the atheists start from a series of presuppositions, which they claim (baselessly) are self-evident. They engage their emotions at the start, thus rejecting any questions or facts which might suggest even the possibility of created universe. They shut their minds, and praise themselves for doing so, claiming that they are ‘bright’ and that religious believers are stupid.

They deny that they have any motives for holding these presuppositions, and so refuse to discuss those motives – which are the only interesting things about their position, otherwise a dull statement of unproven certainty, usually garlanded with jeers about the ‘stupidity’ of those who don’t agree with them. Worse, it is often accompanied by intolerant and potentially totalitarian beliefs about the teaching of religion to children.(See my ‘The Rage Against God’)

This is often coupled with the ludicrous claim that babies are all atheists , until they fall into the hands of religious indoctrinators. This, as I’ve pointed out is as absurd as Christians claiming that atheists born into atheist cultures are all religious believers, until they fall into the hands of atheist propagandists. Babies, of course, have no beliefs of any kind, any more than hedgehogs do. They are encouraged, as they grow into full humanity, into certain beliefs which are current in the societies in which they are raised. But as soon as they become aware that these beliefs *are* beliefs, then they can in principle be persuaded to believe something else, or to stop believing what they believe.

Only those who pretend that (or have been fooled into thinking that) ‘our belief is not a belief’ are not open to such persuasion. And in this way, atheists who deny that their belief is a belief (a position almost universal among the militant, ignorant, spiteful and intolerant new breed of God-hater) are like worshippers of some jungle idol , who belong to an isolated tribe which has never encountered anyone who does not worship this idol. They, too, do not know (or think) that their belief is a belief, or that any choice is available. But they have more of an excuse for this delusion, as they are surrounded by thousands of square miles of uninhabited rainforest, whereas the modern intolerant atheist is surrounded by two thousand years of learning, literature, history, philosophy, music, art and architecture, in which the existence and nature of an alternative view, frequently held by intelligent and informed persons, is made plain.

The truth is that atheism and theism only exist as concepts because they are two options in a choice (the third option is agnosticism) . If there were no choice, the words would not need to exist. I am sure, in the Newspeak of the ‘new atheists’, some such linguistic measure is being attempted.

Mr Godfrey also says : ‘The Nazi party claimed to be socialist for propaganda reasons (**PH : There is a good joke to be had here about a number of other nominally socialist parties, but I will refrain from making it) , one can look at their actions on family (for instance) to see their conservative ideology shining through, espousing in this case exactly the approach you do yourself Mr Hitchens, that a women's place is raising children, and having as many as possible,’

**Well, that is not actually my position, at least not so far as I know, and if Mr Godfrey can produce any evidence that it is, I should like to see it. It is a false caricature of my position, which is that state and culture should stop treating full-time motherhood as a shameful waste of resources, and as a demeaning activity for an educated woman, or indeed any woman, and should stop arguing that paid work outside the home is morally superior to unpaid work in the home. I have no views on how many children other people should have. It is up to them.

Mr Godfrey also notes that the National Socialists took to “… outlawing abortion, hardly a leftist position.”

***TO which I reply that Stalin’s USSR also outlawed abortion (after an initial period when it was freely permitted, see my ‘Rage Against God’ ), and you can’t get much more leftist than that. Leftists who are in power, have aggressive foreign policies and have big conscript armies tend to be against abortion, for obvious reasons. Leftist governments have also been strong persecutors of homosexuals (Castro, the USSR) users of Torture ( lots and lots of them) and of capital punishment (Castro and now China and Vietnam). The National Socialists did not, as far as I know, have any moral objection to abortion. Though they may have used the objections of others as cover for a policy essnetially aimed at ensuring the supply of cannon-fodder.

He says that the NSDAP’s ‘approach to Atheism… could send one to the camps,’

Is that so? I had never heard of anyone being sent to the German concentration camps for atheism as such. I am pretty sure some of the senior NSDAP figures were openly atheist. Can he give me facts and references on this?

He then quotes Hitler (I’d be glad of a reference here) ‘ In this speech from 1933 Hitler makes clear his faith, and his hatred of non-believers: "To do justice to God and our own conscience, we have turned once more to the German Volk." "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

I would guess he was there referring (in the word 'atheistic') to the Communists, but I’d need context to check. We have discussed Hitler’s religious beliefs (and his political game with the churches) before. He was not an atheist. But it is fairly clear that he was also not a Christian. As to what he was, I draw readers’ attention to the extraordinary prophecy made by the poet Heinrich Heine , in ‘Religion and Philosophy in Germany’ , in 1832, almost exactly a century before it was fulfilled :

‘Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ...

'... Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder comes rolling somewhat slowly, but its crash will be unlike anything before in the history of the world.

'At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ... A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.’

Mr Godfrey urges me ‘Please have the decency to admit to where your own ideas, taken to the extreme can end up, as I have to admit and ponder about Marxism, you must about Conservatism.’

**Well, if anyone can point to where my Anglican, Burkean ideas can lead when taken to the extreme, I’ll cheerfully own up to it.

But his comparison with Franco and the South American juntas seems a bit far-fetched. I have nothing in common with them that I can see, and if I do, perhaps he can say what it is?

He also says that ‘enlightenment ideas are what give us democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of association and the rule of law, before that was Absolutism, Church and Crown trampling all before them, in lock step. Which I sincerely doubt is what you desire, or I have misjudged you. ‘

I think this is a misreading of history, and urge him to read the opening section of Macaulay’s ‘History of England’ in which he points out that absolutism had not flourished in England for centuries before the Cromwellian age, and that it was an attempt to impose it on this country that led to the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The rule of law, especially its superiority over temporal power, as set out in Magna Carta (the root of all civilised government in the world) originates in Christianity. Church and Crown were endlessly in conflict with each other in England, hence the great cult of Thomas a Becket.

I didn’t say Mr Embery was ‘slow on the uptake’. I said he was ‘obtuse’, an entirely different thing , which I note he is reluctant to repeat, fearing perhaps that others may agree with me. He was being so, and I didn’t need to get angry, nor did I get angry, to point out this fact to him. He then flounced off, in my view because he was losing the exchange.

Mr ‘B’ says : ‘You give the game away when you write: "one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit" , a perfect example of "argumentum ad consequentiam". This demonstrates that you are arguing according to your emotions, rather than to the "facts and logic" which you continually espouse.

**I reply ‘This is broadly true. I am quite clear about it. But he fails to note that I only cease to use facts and logic because, in his particular argument, they cannot answer the question. As I have said here before not above a thousand times, the default position on religion, provided by all the facts and logic the human mind can provide, is agnosticism. I cheerfully accept that if I wish to go beyond this point, to religious belief, I am obviously making a choice based upon my desires. But I am endlessly amused by the fact that hardly any atheists are prepared to admit the same, and instead indulge in teenage word-games to pretend that their belief isn’t a belief. I thought English linguistic philosophy was pretentious and dire when I first encountered it, but it is elegant and intellectual prepared with this lumpish ( and usually snotty) evasiveness.

All I ask is that, where facts and logic cannot decide the issue (which is the case on the God question and related matters) my opponents would be so kind as to admit that they, too, are influenced in their choice by their desires. Alas the God-haters are stuck. Their initial impulse is hatred of God, which leads them then to dismiss all evidence of his possible existence. They are so deluded by their own petulant, self-seeking fury that they cannot see themselves for what they are. These seething emotions are then visited instead upon those who dare to suggest that God might in fact exist.

He says : ‘You are guilty of precisely the fault of which you accuse Mr Falls. Knowledge of the workings of the human brain and the role of free will are being constantly updated’ . **Well, no doubt, but knowledge of the human brain remains superficial and very sketchy.

‘ and some of the conclusions reached by the likes of Sam Harris make for very uncomfortable reading for those brought up to believe in the primacy of free will in our actions. I would hope that it would be common ground that our actions and reactions are determined by the workings of the brain.’

** (I’m not quite sure about the word ‘determined’ here. Greatly affected, for certain. But I think there are those who might question the all-embracing description ‘determined’. The argument about consciousness and the brain is very complex and tricky. Just hesitating, not being dogmatic).

‘If so, surely the introduction of a toxic substance into the brain can affect our judgement, our responses and our ability to control our actions. You constantly argue that the abuse of drugs damages the brain and the psyche. Why do you stop short of conceding that it can damage our ability to make rational decisions, or to exercise free will?’

**I haven’t stopped short of it. It damages everything (though it is absurd to say that it makes the exercise of will impossible) . But I won’t accept initial criminal drug-taking as an excuse (legal or moral) for continued criminal drug-taking. As my main purpose is to deter people from ever taking drugs in the first place, I am mostly concerned with the initial decision, in any case. Severe punishment of those who possess illegal drugs, at whatever stage, would ensure that in many more cases. This will inevitably involve punishment of so-called ‘addicts’, who would find, in disciplined and properly-run prisons, that they were quite capable of giving up the substances to which they claimed to be ‘addicted’. So I win both ways.

‘Sharispa’ asks : ‘In ‘The Rage Against God’ you say that the most frightening thing for revolutionary socialists to accept is that the socialist project failed because it sought to usurp the place of God in people's lives. Why do you think that some ex revolutionary socialists can accept this (albeit very few) and others cannot? Could it be because those who cannot accept are still actually such socialists and cannot let go of the utopian idea, while those who can accept have let go of the idea? Anyway, I don't want to second guess you and would be interested in your view.’

**My view has always been that belief in God and a serious religious position are most likely to form in the minds of mature and experienced adults. The nature of our society allows and encourages people to remain in a permanent adolescence. People in the university-educated elite classes of the post 1960s West no longer grow up. So they remain moral teenagers, demanding sovereignty over their own bodies and insisting on their ‘right’ to ruin themselves if they so wish, failing to understand that they are not islands unto themselves. It is this understanding that is crucial to abandoning utopian schemes, which are all about human vanity.

Mr W asserts: ‘readers should know that PH defines addiction as something that CANNOT be overcome by will power alone’. Perhaps he could tell me where I have so defined it.

I don’t have much to say about Thursday’s ‘Question Time’, except to say that I was distressed by the sycophancy shown in general to Russell Brand , who was at best platitudinous. And to point out that my views are not identical to those of Melanie Phillips, with whom I have had more than one quite sharp exchange on foreign policy matters and on the Tory Party. I am also not wholly at one with her on the drugs issue, and do not (for instance) accept the validity of figures claiming that drug abuse is falling in this country. How could such figures be reliably obtained? Nor do I believe that drug abuse is something that can be ‘treated’.

Can the person now posting as ‘David Jatt’ please settle upon one name for himself? Others are entitled to know that he is posting under more than one name.

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27 August 2012 10:43 AM

I gather from Twitter that Victoria Coren couldn’t be bothered to read (or reply to) my response to her ‘Observer’ article last week. Well, if that was too much of an effort, she has an alternative.

I wrote a brief letter to the ‘Observer’, explaining my objections to what she had said. I had hoped that newspaper, once the standard-bearer of civilised, fair-minded liberalism, and respected by many for its correct and courageous refusal to back the Suez invasion, would publish this epistle. But it hasn’t ( and since every letter in this week’s paper referred to a week-old article, and none to any from further back in time, I suspect it now won’t).

So, for those who can’t be doing with my lengthy dissections of Miss Coren’s article (including her, apparently ) here is the letter:

‘Victoria Coren (‘Don’t be nice to addicts. Be fair’ 19.08.12) makes several mistaken assumptions about my beliefs and opinions on illegal drugs. May I correct them? I have no wish to ‘hate’ heroin abusers. It is the action I loathe, not the person. You do not have to be indulgent to be compassionate. I do not want to put people in prison for its own sake. If deterrents are effective, and people understand that they are real, they rarely need to be used. Unlike her, I don’t wish to instruct my opponents, peremptorily, to agree with me. I just want them to consider my arguments rationally, and to rebut them (if they can) with facts and logic rather than with personal abuse.'

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21 August 2012 11:24 AM

…is that she’s confused about what addiction means, and so cannot say anything sensible about it. The Victoria I’m referring to is Ms Victoria Coren, yet another metropolitan clever-dick who has found his or her way on to the comment circuit long before he or she has had time to become gnarled, world-weary etc. Photographs show her as anything but gnarled, despite the fact that she is, I’m told, a distinguished poker player, and consorts with alternative comedians, both of which would certainly gnarl me.

in ‘The Observer’ an unpopular Sunday newspaper. But I shall now help her to become a bit more gnarled and world-weary.

It is an odd lecture. If I have properly understood her, she begins by comparing me to the Wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, thus : ‘On Newsnight, Russell Brand and Peter Hitchens had a pointless row about compassion. They were like Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf (one lustrous-haired and touchingly naive; the other snarling, clawing and evidently harbouring eager thoughts of the severed finger he'd popped in his pocket to eat later).’

Eh? Sometimes you just have to accept that other people’s thought processes are different from your own. I assume I’m not touchingly naïve (thank heaven for that, even if it also means my hair is not lustrous, which indeed it is not). Snarling and clawing? Well, if you didn’t like me, because I have bad opinions and must therefore be a bad person, you might choose to describe reasonable self-defence in these terms. But putting a severed finger in my pocket to eat later? What? Where did that come from?

AS for being ‘pointless’. No serious person can dismiss as ‘pointless’ a public argument about principles which makes others think.

Anyway, it then gets (slightly ) more coherent and to the point. As in : ‘But compassion is irrelevant to the categorising of addiction. Accepting it's an illness doesn't mean you have to care.’

**Oddly enough, I should have thought it did mean exactly that. If someone has fallen ill through no fault of his own, you are rather obliged to care, be sympathetic, be concerned in healing him. That’s why the difference is important. If this person has deliberately, having ignored a thousand warnings, inflicted the wound on himself, you must of course still care about his grief and his wound, but in a significantly different way. This raises another simple point; that those who would use fear of punishment to deter people from self-destruction don’t necessarily lack compassion. They just don’t mix it up with soft-headedness.

Ms Coren is apparently giving up smoking tobacco. Good luck to her, I hope very much she succeeds, as I know in some detail what will probably happen to her if she doesn’t. Many people do give up , though it is obviously extremely hard. The difficulty arises not least because cigarettes are legal, openly on sale in many shops. They are also socially acceptable in many places (such as poker games, and for all I know among alternative comedians). Perhaps that is why, as Theodore Dalrymple says, from his observations of heroin abusers while working as a prison doctor, that it is harder to give up smoking , by some way, than it is to give up heroin.

**Here we go. Into the argument this curious assertion hops, unexplained, simply stated as if an uncontested fact. ‘If you’re a natural addict, you press on’. How many huge questions does this raise? Who is, and who is not ‘ a natural addict’? How does one test objectively for the presence of this condition in the human body? Do ‘natural addicts’ still fall victim to their ‘natural addictions’ in societies that Ms Coren would no doubt regard as ‘repressive’, that is, ones in which people are taught from their earliest youth to control their urges, to delay gratification and to mistrust pleasure that has not been earned? Would the hundreds of thousands of alleged heroin ‘addicts’ in modern Britain have become ‘addicts’ had we maintained the culture, laws and morals that we had before about 1960?

If these are significant variables, can the phrase ‘natural addict’ have any validity? Human weakness is universal and lies in all of us. Mine is particularly unexciting. I eat too much (not usually fingers, though) . I could stop if I really wanted to. Sometimes I do. I keep it under reasonable control most of the time. But I don’t care enough to get it fully under control. My guess is that it will kill me only very slowly and not too unpleasantly. It’s also unlikely to make me a burden on other people. But the fault is in me, in that I could try harder if I really wanted to. I can’t blame anyone else. I would despise myself if I did.

As for smoking, I think many people start doing it not because of how it feels, but because of how they think it makes them look. The ancient problem of what to do with your hands (and face) in an awkward social situation is solved. The advertisements - when they had them - played quite cleverly on that, getting non-smokers to envy the cool, socially adept, sophisticated person they would become once they began sporting that particular smart packet (don’t believe that isn’t important, especially to women), and lighting that particular brand with a practised flourish. It might make you cough and vomit to start with, but passing through that stage was a necessary step to becoming the new cool you.

Now that it’s socially less acceptable, and often banned in resorts of pleasure, and now that everyone knows how dangerous it is, aren’t quite a lot of ‘natural addicts’ either giving it up or never starting? In which case, how natural were they? The phrase doesn’t really help at all. It’s certainly not the objectively scientific term Ms Coren seems to think it is (because it suits her to think so). As for Heroin users, *nobody*, but *nobody* is ignorant of the risks of this drug, and I believe it takes several goes to reach the stage where you imagine you can’t live without it. So could it be that you just press on because you’re a naturally selfish, thoughtless, inconsiderate little toad who places his own pleasure above all other considerations (as most of us are, when the mood takes us)? How much nicer, though, to be called a ‘natural addict’ . It takes away the crucial aspect, that you might yourself have been involved in choosing whether or not to poke a sharp ( and quite possibly dirty) piece of metal into your body and using it to pump an illegal poison into your bloodstream - which you already knew was a stupid thing to do.

Ms Coren continues :’Once you're hooked, it still doesn't feel good, but (and here's where we fall in with our junkie cousins) it now makes you feel normal. QED: if you have to take something to feel normal, it doesn't matter if it's a fag or a needle or a Nurofen, you're not well.’

**Once again, this is an assertion, and a self-serving one as well. Ms Coren was born, I think , in 1973. Long before she could talk or read, it was established beyond all doubt that smoking was terribly dangerous to your health, and particularly to the health of women. Why, even in my Jurassic childhood I can remember a pair of huge scary billboards outside Portsmouth Town Hall (circa 1962) with the legend ‘Ashes….to Ashes’. The first showed an ashtray with a lit cigarette. The second portrayed a large urn of human ashes marked ‘RIP’ .

She *must* have known what she was doing. I have never quite been able to get out of my mind this fact about many members of my generation. I think the problem with them (the smell of smoke has always repelled me, and my sense of smell has always been very strong. My attempts to start were foredoomed) was that the coolness, the sexual signal (the smoker is surely more worldly, more humorous, more available than the non-smoker, as Hollywood has for years been at pains to suggest) , the ability to satisfy the craving for something to taste without the risk of getting fat, the membership of a club of sophisticates, simply overrode all the warnings, of a peril which seemed so distant anyway. What if we might one day die? We all have to die of something. Ho ho. Well, I know a bit more than I did then about what cancer does to the human frame towards the end, and it’s my view that we might make a bit more of this in propaganda. It’s quite important, it turns out, which something you die of, not least because dying can take quite a while these days.

But of course the advertisements and the general social acceptance made each decision to give up an individual, solitary, slightly priggish one, and each decision to continue a collective, socially acceptable, even cool one. I think that has begun to change among educated, professional people, partly thanks to office smoking bans, partly thanks to advertising bans and pub and restuarant bans, partly because that selfish generation have children of their own and a) want to see them grow and b) don’t want to give them a dreadful example. In a small but limited way ( necessary because it's very hard to ban something in wide use which has always been legal) the threat of the law has helped to reduce this scourge. In the case of heroin and cannabis, already illegal, we have a much wider scope for preventive, deterrent action.

Ms Coren declares : ‘Unlike Nurofen, the addict's substance is both treating and creating the agony.’

**Agony? Isn’t that putting it a bit high?

Ms Coren again’ So every smoker/junkie, however desperate (** ‘desperate’. This overused word needs to be examined every time it’s employed. It has suffered severe inflation. In this case, doesn’t it actually mean , at most ‘ desirous’ . In which case, can’t the person involved control the desire? Of course he can. But he doesn’t want to) ‘…to keep going, wishes he had never started. If you saw someone repeatedly smashing his arm against a wall, 40 times a day, unable to stop, would you say he was a self-indulgent hedonist? Or would you just know he was ill?

**My reply. It’s all very well saying you wish you had never started. But why? Where is the surprise trick ending? What didn’t they tell you? If you really wished that, you actually wouldn’t have started. You wanted to start. You did so knowing this would happen. You wanted to. You didn’t care. Likewise, if you really wished to stop, you would stop. The true desire to stop is the heart of all abstinence programmes, as everyone knows. If someone got pleasure or other advantage from the sort of self-harm described, then yes, hedonism could explain it.

Then I get :’ Fear not, Peter Hitchens; that doesn't make you Pollyanna.’

**Who said I hate these people? I’m rather famously (the religion is famous, not me) not allowed to hate people by my religion, a religion Ms Coren may know little about and might well, given her generation and milieu, despise. I don’t presume to know (as she presumes to know so much of my mind) , so I am happy to be corrected if I am mistaken. I can loathe actions, but never the people that do them. As for the use of the word ‘patient’, once more an assertion not backed by evidence, this simply assumes a conclusion which is not proved or agreed. How could I blame a patient? But I can blame a wilful criminal, and I do.

Ms Coren ‘No need to feel compassion’. **On the contrary. But compassion is not the same as indulgence of wrong actions. It may actually require a serious attempt to deter or punish those wrong actions.

Ms Coren : ‘but we all benefit from clarity. So: accept that addiction is an illness, then simply admit it's an illness you don't care about.’

**This is perhaps the most threadbare and unattractive part of the whole article. It is similar to Mr Rifkind's recent instruction to me to knuckle under to the new moral and cultural order, apparently because I am in the minority, and unfashionable. It mingles a self-righteous assumption of superior personal goodness on the part of Ms Coren with a shrill series of commands that I must henceforth think as she does because she says so.

The superiority is of the usual sort. Only liberals care. I supposedly ‘don’t care’ because I insist that drug abusers have free will. Even on the most basic logic, how can it be said that I ‘don’t care’? It’s a subject on which I have chosen to speak and write many times, amongst other exposing myself to the incessant, smug, priggish jibes of fashionable liberal know-alls who - despite expensive educations - are so unschooled in moral questions that they have never even considered that there might be a different point of view to theirs. Then there’s that word ‘accept’, used in the imperative.

Doesn’t it have about it more than a slight air of ‘I am right! You will obey!’ . Why should I ‘accept’ this, or the other demands she makes below? Where has she proved her case in fact or logic? But she doesn’t need to persuade, for fashion is on her side.

Listen to Victoria, ordering me to get my mind right: ’Accept that prison can't possibly be a deterrent for people who are already giving themselves the death penalty’.

** Why should I ‘accept’ this proposition? The great wasteland of thoughtlessness in this peremptory stuff is obvious to anyone who can think independently of fashion. From my point of view it’s obvious that if a person has free will, the real fear of a deterrent punishment will help him or her to decide to stay away from a habit that is nasty and destructive, and which it will take a great deal of effort to shake off. It will also give the criminal justice system the power to threaten unpleasant consequences to those who won’t try to give up, and the power to keep them out of the reach of the drug while they do give up. It would be ( if we used it ) a perfectly sensible use of the law for good ends. If we treated the possession of heroin as a crime, then many fewer people would use heroin in the first place.

But what if we accept Ms Coren’s fact-free psychobabble, her pseudo-scientific assertion, that ‘addiction’ is a hopeless disease, rooted in an incurable weakness and itself all but incurable too? All right, let’s do so, for the sake of argument.

Surely in that case we are justified in the most fearsome deterrent measures to stop the individual taking the first fatal step. If she really believed what she purports to believe, the logic of her position would lead her to support deterrent punishment, to save these ‘natural addicts’ from what will otherwise be their inescapable fate. I can see no way out of this for Ms Coren. Her own logic is a stronger argument for deterrent punishment of drug possession than mine is. How compassionate is it, when you can stop someone becoming an ‘addict’ to destroy or undermine the only credible deterrent to this fate?

After that, it just descends into puerile jeering, worthy of Mr Brand himself :’ you're still free to argue that junkies should be in prison, eg because they've committed theft or just look a bit horrible.’

Thieves, if properly convicted, should be in prison for theft. That’s a reasonable statement. How can it possibly be equated, in the mind of an educated person, with the idea that someone should be in prison for looking a ‘bit horrible’ ?

By the way, I’m all in favour of abstinence rather than the worse-than-useless Methadone, a worthless and morally destitute scheme under which the government mugs the public on behalf of drug abusers. But abstinence that is not backed by deterrent punishment is unlikely to succeed ( as Mr Brand’s own BBC3 programme seemed to demonstrate).

I wouldn’t mind so much, but there is no doubt Ms Coren, like Mr Brand, takes her own self very seriously indeed, and so do some others. So, alas, we must do so too.

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12 August 2012 7:02 PM

Some of you have already seen the televised part of an encounter between me and the alleged comedian Russell Brand on Friday night. We were both taking part in a discussion on the BBC2 programme Newsnight, which can, for the moment, be watched here.

There was some speculation later in the programme as to whether Mr Brand did in fact kiss me off air. I can now state that he did not (see below).

As well as me and Mr Brand, the discussion featured a Tory MP called David Burrowes, and his friend Chip Somers, who you can look up. The presenter was Stephanie Flanders, who generally appears as one of the BBC’s senior economics commentators. Much of the discussion is perfectly clear on the film. But there are two points at which it becomes a bit of a bout between me and Mr Brand. I am not sure, in any case, how long it will be available on the BBC i-player.

I provide the following transcript (which, if not perfect, is as close as I can get to accuracy) to make it easier for others to make a dispassionate assessment. I feel the need to do this partly because of the response on Twitter on Friday night. I have already described this strange means of communication as an ‘electronic left-wing mob’, which it is. On this occasion it was also an electronic lavatory wall, on which contributors almost universally (I think it was universally, but I must allow for the chance that I missed something) agreed that Mr Brand has ‘wiped the floor’ with me or ‘run rings round me’. I honestly couldn’t see how this could be said. As an argument, it left a lot to be desired, but Mr Brand certainly hadn’t won it with any key fact or argument. Mr Brand is a major celebrity with all the adulation and sycophancy which that state encourages. He was appearing alongside an ally (Mr Somers) and a Tory MP who was a good deal more sympathetic to Mr Brand than he was to my position (this is no surprise to me, but I suspect most Twitter activists are politically rather limited and think that the Tory Party is diabolically right wing).

I had hoped not to meet Mr Brand in the green room beforehand, as I was sure that he would be ingratiating, and the green room (a cramped waiting room close to the studio, free of glamour) is pretty small at the best of times. That evening it was already occupied by two Olympic Gold Medal winners. They were being very generous with their medals, letting other guests handle them, and modestly accepting congratulations. Mr Brand, who at this stage appeared shirtless, so that we could see his tattoos and a large plaster on his torso, quickly charmed them into letting him wear their medals. He was also ingratiating, making various protestations of friendliness to me, which I politely but firmly rebuffed because I didn’t think they were genuine, and because I saw no reason to pretend friendliness towards him when I dislike everything he does.

My main reason for agreeing to appear was the opportunity it gave me to criticise the fact that the BBC was giving its facilities to such a person to make a documentary on drugs, and to argue against a) the strange belief that people who take illegal drugs have no control over themselves and deserve sympathy and b) the comical fiction that this country maintains a regime of penal prohibition against drugs. Later on it emerged that there would also be a chance to point out that the Tory Party is useless. It seemed worth giving up an evening for.

Here is a transcript of the two verbal brawls I had with Mr Brand:

The first took place roughly seven minutes into the programme: (SF is Stephanie Flanders, PH is me, RB is Mr Brand)

SF: (addressing PH) Russell Brand says this is a disorder, we should treat drug addiction like a disease, Do you agree?

PH: No, It’s a crime, it involves the possession of a Class ‘A’ drug which is a criminal offence, which people do voluntarily and they do it for pleasure. And if we continue to treat it as a disease, which (they) should be sympathised with, there will be more and more of it as there has been over the past many years. We do not any more enforce our own laws on this subject. The very word ‘addiction’ assumes that the person involved has no free will.

SF: You have no sympathy at all with the people who get trapped on drugs for years on end?

PH: I have sympathy with anybody who gets themselves into trouble. But sympathy isn’t the point. What I don’t have is any sympathy with somebody who deliberately breaks a known law. They are criminals. They should be punished. And honestly if they were punished for this they would by and large not get into the trouble they get into and there would be many, many fewer of them. But we don’t do that. Look at the figures for arrests of people even for possession of Class A drugs which we supposedly view most seriously. Of the ones who are convicted, fewer than one in ten are actually sentenced to imprisonment. This is a Class ‘A’ drug, the most serious.

SF: Russell Brand, they are criminals, What’s wrong with what he’s saying?

RB: I understand what Peter is saying. And I understand his frustration. As a person that has to deal with drug addicts in my life they are a frustrating type of person to deal with, But I think Peter that if you can find in yourself to look at human beings with compassion and love rather than with aggression, you will find there is more of an opportunity for progress. I know it’s annoying, but..

PH: I don’t wish to be lectured on aggression by you. You’ve been extremely aggressive to me in the past when we have met…

RB: That was because of the bigotry, Peter. I don’t mean it. I’m only having a bit of fun because of the Daily Mail stuff and that.

PH: When you actually learn to use reason you can accuse people of bigotry. Until then I should keep very quiet about it. Learn to use some reason in this matter.

SF: We’re very reasoned on Newsnight

PH: Why is a comedian being given a programme on the BBC to push a policy about drugs?

SF: Because he has first-hand experience

PH: Why is our debate on drugs so debased that this is the kind of the thing we are reduced to?

RB: Peter, why are you so angry?

PH: I am angry because many, many young people in this country are being betrayed…

RB: What do you think we should do?

PH…by a feeble government and a feeble est[ablishment]…

RB: What do you think we should do, Peter ?

PH: I think we should enforce our law against illegal drugs…

RB: You want people in prison?

PH: I don’t want people in prison, no, I want people deterred from taking drugs…

RB: How?

PH …taking drugs which will ruin their lives, by punishment

RB: But how, I want that…(interrupts, unclear)I don’t want people to take drugs, Peter

PH: … by punishment, by effective…

PH: You asked a question, you had better listen to the answer. I want them deterred

RB: I don’t think you’re ignorant. I just think you’re innocent. You’re like a peculiar child.

PH: You see, ad hominem, ad hominem and interruption, absolutely nothing remotely resembling reason, thought or fact and yet you are making a programme on drugs for the BBC and I am not. And that is exactly what is wrong.

SF: (intervenes)

My summary of this exchange. Mr Brand seeks to patronize me, calling me ‘frustrated’, and later asking why I am ‘angry’. There is no doubt that he (having had the opening few minutes of Newsnight devoted to a film about his BBC3 programme (uninterrupted by me or anyone) and then a solo interview with Ms Flanders (also uninterrupted by me or anyone) is repeatedly interrupting me without the presenter making any effort to restrain him. His interruptions are destructive, in that he never waits for an answer to any of his questions but talks over the response, often with another question. And they are of course personally abusive (again unrestrained by the presenter). It becomes necessary for me to point this out, so reducing the time available to make my case. The other undercurrent is that one can only be kind and compassionate if one accepts the view of drugtaker as victim. The possibility that the other view, of allowing the person to have responsibility for his own actions and encouraging him to take responsibility, might be, in effect more compassionate, and derives from a desire to help one’[s fellow man just as much if not more, is excluded.

Roughly 15 minutes into the programme, there is a second, briefer passage:

RB: I understand your frustration, mate (addressed to me), but I really think that the techniques and methods that you’re talking about are antiquated and belong in another era. That kind of foghorn madness from bygone times is not going to help anybody.

PH: There you go again. No reason. Just abuse. I love to see the embrace between you and the Conservative Party. The more of it the better, the more people will realize how useless the Conservative Party is to people in this country who care about these things.

Here Mr Brand’s argument, apart from yet more personal abuse, is that my position is ‘antiquated’. He genuinely believes a) that this is an argument and b) that it is unanswerable. People with conservative opinions are often dealt with in this way. ‘Don’t you realise this is the 21st century?’ we are asked scornfully, as if the truth altered with the flip of the calendar. Actually the argument is totalitarian. They don’t really think that the passage of time has abolished truth or logic. They are saying (and this is the purpose of all such propaganda) ‘We have won and there is nothing you can do about it’.

Well, maybe they have won. I cannot see the future, but this sort of triumphalism always makes me wish that children were still taught Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, the cleverest and most devastating warning against those who think their power will last forever. The mocking double meaning of the words ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ is a lifelong gift to all who read these lines. I have in my life seen mighty tyrannies fall, sometimes close at hand, and it is startling to see how pathetic and lonely they appear once the end is near.

I have also learned to look at overweening spokesmen for triumphant majority views with a sceptical eye. Maybe they won’t always be winning. But what if they are? Like Whittaker Chambers in another controversy, I suspect much of the time that I have picked the losing side. But that does not daunt me. Losing sides often end up winning in the end, and even if they don’t, I would rather serve the truth, and be beaten, than serve a lie, and win. Isn’t this the normal view of any self-respecting human person?

Oh, and Mr Brand made no attempt to kiss me, though he did stand too close to me and make yet more unconvincing protestations of friendliness, in a TV Centre corridor, after the programme. In the end, after I had had to back away from him, he said (rather more honestly) words to the effect that I was part of a dying breed and he wouldn’t be sorry when we were all gone, and I responded that at least that was his honest opinion.

I suspect that such a kiss, without my consent, would have been sexual harassment, and that would surely never do. Nor, I have to say, would a reluctance to be kissed by Mr Brand be conclusive evidence, in itself, of the ‘homophobia’ he alleged against me. I, indeed anyone, might just not want to be kissed by Russell Brand. A male person would not even have to be exclusively heterosexual, or ‘heteronormative’ let alone ‘homophobic’ to prefer to avoid such an experience. I can’t of course speak for women, some of who seem to be rather taken by Mr Brand. As I am heterosexual and heteronormative, I have extra reasons for wanting to avoid his embrace. But ‘homophobia’ isn’t one of them.

For a rather different BBC moment, a five-minute interview of me by Matthew Stadlen, you may go here. Or you will be able to when the link is fixed, which will I hope be soon. In the meantime, just put the words 'BBC' and 'Five minutes with Peter Hitchens' into any search engine, and you will find it.

I’m not sure whether to be pleased or otherwise that this is classed by the Corporation as ‘entertainment’.

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21 June 2011 8:26 AM

I will turn in a moment to comments on this week’s column. But first I’d like to take up once more a discussion we had last week about ‘anger’ in debate. This arises from my appearance on Sunday on BBC1’s ‘The Big Questions’, which is still on the iPlayer if anyone wishes to watch it.

The second half of the discussion was devoted to the Israeli-Arab question. I repeated the arguments I made in my article from Gaza last autumn, which was posted here. But the Palestinian case was put mainly by a man in a chequered keffiyeh scarf and matching tie, and by a female alleged comedian from Glasgow who made several interjections along the standard propaganda lines of the current anti-Israel campaign.

Were either or both of these people consumed with anger? Would those who make this claim about my public appearances (with the intention of invalidating my arguments) make the same claim about either of them? I would be interested to know.

My suspicion is that they would not. Most people are perfectly happy to see their own opinions forcefully and passionately expressed, and I would imagine my critics have pretty much swallowed the current anti-Israel orthodoxy of the blathering classes. Yet in one of these cases I think the speaker actually damaged his cause by being so impassioned. Nor did he have the excuse that he needed to shout to get heard. He had been given a prominent position, his own microphone and a pretty-much-guaranteed major role in the discussion.

In answer to comments, I called the author Sir Terence Pratchett because he chose to accept a knighthood. As far as I know, it was given in that form, and if it hadn’t been, it would have been absurd. The formulation ‘Sir Terry’ is ridiculous and incongruous, and if people don’t wish to be addressed by their full names they shouldn’t accept titles of honour.

I have heard the position of the new atheists well summed up elsewhere as ‘God doesn’t exist – and I hate Him!’ But I wasn’t aware that Sir Terence (whose books I have not felt compelled to finish, or explore further, after sampling one or two) had said he hated God for not existing. Both positions are of course nonsensical. Sir Terence has no idea if God exists or not, and can believe in Him tonight if he chooses to do so. You cannot hate someone who is not there.

My own view is that both believers and atheists fear that God exists, but believers also hope that he does. The passion which atheists devote the subject suggests (as such passion almost invariably does) a grave uncertainty underneath. So do the linguistic and debating tricks employed by some atheist bores (and there is no more expert and accomplished room-emptier than one of these) to strip them of any responsibility for their religious opinions, which they have somehow been ‘forced’ into.

Mr ‘Avid Fan’ tells me I am self-righteous and asks me to assert that his grandmother is better off now than if she’d committed suicide some years ago. He interprets her stated wish to join her late husband, when she was still coherent, as a desire to do so. Or so it seems to me.

I believe that the Christian religion (though not Judaism) has set its canon against self-slaughter. I am also (incidentally) haunted by a macabre Charles Williams story in which a man kills himself and finds that nothing has happened except that he is exactly where he was before, only in a perceptibly darker, more sinister version of the world he was attempting to leave, populated by others like himself, and with a rope still uncomfortably round his neck. What if suicide, far from being an escape, is a way deeper into the woe that takes us there?

For me, therefore, there is no choice in the matter. It is something I must not do, and must not aid another to do. Others are in a different position, especially if it becomes legal to assist suicide. Would I be let off if (for instance) I were in some state of unutterable despair which was not of my own making – say in the midst of being tortured slowly to death in some despot’s dungeon? I like to think so. But I don’t know.

One of the main reasons for this prohibition, though not the principal one, is (I think) the unending puzzled grief and guilt which suicide leaves behind it.

Many old and bereaved people speak longingly of their wish to rejoin their lifelong companion. Many others just speak of their wish to be dead. Yet very few of them take their own lives, even so, though they have the power to do so.

I am not sure it is self-righteous to advance the arguments I set out. Did Mr Avid Fan ever ask his grandmother if he could help her achieve this end, which would be the logical conclusion of thee view he now expresses? I have to say that I very much doubt it, and it is easy to imagine why he didn’t. Most of us, self-righteous or no, would feel there was something grotesque and ugly about such an offer, even made out of kindness. And we might also suspect that the answer would be pretty brusque (old, ill people can be surprisingly forceful when they choose). In which case is it fair to use her statement of wistful longing as a retrospective justification for sending her into the Big Sleep now?

One of the problems with senility and dementia, as with many other states of being on the fringe of life, is that we have little or no idea of what the person is actually feeling and experiencing. My own suspicion is that the horrible mismatch between bodily decay and mental decay which makes so many final years so ghastly to behold is a consequence of our modern way of life and of modern medicine’s futile ability to prolong physical existence without being able to prolong health. But that does not permit us to look at the result and say we will deal with it with a lethal injection, a plastic bag or a dose of barbiturates.

There should be far more hospice places, far more concentration on making death more bearable for the dying and for those who love them. But modern medicine, which strives with enormous officiousness to keep people alive up to a certain point, becomes cold and dismissive once they are old. I suspect that many old people are now effectively starved and thirsted to death, while many others are connected to the morphine pump , ostensibly to relieve their pain with no real expectation that they will ever wake up.

In answer to Mr Perrin, this country will not leave the EU until a political party committed to this object is elected with a clear majority. I have explained at length how that could be brought about. It starts with the destruction of the Tory Party. I do not believe in referendums, and am uninterested in the futile Euro-elections to the Brussels Supreme Soviet. Why give this farce legitimacy by taking part in it?

Juries (as described at length in my ‘Abolition of Liberty’, in the chapter ‘Twelve Angry Persons’) used to be selected on the basis of a property qualification, which was in effect an age and education barrier. When this was got rid of, nothing was done to replace it because the government were afraid to do so. Anything they suggested was bound to offend someone. At the time, the minimum voting age was 21, which is bad enough. It is now 18, and may well soon be 16, which will mean 16-year-old jurors.

I was astonished at the age of the woman Fraill. But it did seem to me that a combination of age and educational qualification would be enough to rule out most such people.

Though I am in principle a defender of juries, I sometimes think that the liberal elite has set out to make them look silly and ineffectual, as part of a long-term campaign (which is undoubted, see ‘the Abolition of Liberty’) to get rid of them altogether so that our legal system can be fully merged with that of the EU (where proper independent juries are unknown outside the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic).

A Mr ‘maccamfc’ , in a posting on the frontiers of literacy and coherence, says he ‘became’ a heroin ‘addict’ as if this was beyond his control, and he caught this affliction as one might catch flu. I do not believe this was the case. He started taking heroin, as all heroin abusers do, because he enjoyed it and wanted to, well knowing that it was both illegal and wrong.

No doubt I shall be accused of being callous towards this individual. I don’t think so. It is the wilful drugtaker who is callous to his family and neighbours, not the person who condemns this selfishness and seeks to deter it with punishment.

Whether I am ‘upper class’ or not ( lower upper middle class is my own self-description), I bet his working class neighbours and family have had plenty of cause to regret his choice, even if he thinks he hasn’t. Though I doubt he would admit to that, and he writes under a pseudonym so he needn’t take full responsibility for the truth of his posting.

He also asks us to believe that while he enjoyed himself taking this very expensive drug, which tends, ah, to undermine the work ethic, he was able to support himself for many years (17 by my calculation) and not to rob anyone else. Why, in that case is he now taking methadone, paid for by me and many others out of taxes we would rather spend on something good and useful? Why didn’t he just stop taking heroin, far easier to give up than cigarettes? I have no idea if he is poor. He is certainly undeserving.

Neil Saunders should be aware of the reason why capital punishment is different from abortion and euthanasia.

To be justly executed, you have to be found guilty of a particularly heinous murder by an impartial jury, to fail in repeated appeals and to be refused a reprieve by the Home Secretary after careful individual consideration of all aspects of your case..

To be aborted or euthanised, you just have to be weak and inconvenient.

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22 May 2011 2:04 AM

I am sick of the censorship that surrounds the issue of rape. So I shall defy it. Of course all rapes are bad. But some rapes are worse than others.

The extension of rape, to cover any situation where a woman says she has been raped, is a huge difficulty for a fair legal system that relies on actual evidence before deciding guilt.

Even for saying this, I know quite well that I will get raging, lying abuse. This is what happened to Kenneth Clarke, right, when he went on the radio and tried to speak his mind as if this were a free country.

As he quickly found out, it is not. I am sorry that he was in the end forced to grovel. But this is a Liberal, PC government, and I am not surprised.

Revolutionary feminism, which regards all men as predators and sees the married family as a sordid prison, has scared most politicians, most judges, most journalists, most civil servants – and most people – into accepting its nasty dogmas.

Oddly enough, Mr Clarke would normally be an ally of this cause. But ultra-feminist zealotry is bitterly intolerant of any disagreement, however gentle or thoughtful. Nothing short of total submission will do.

The problem is Mr Clarke’s unceasing search for ways of stopping our prisons from bursting. The answer is quite simple – the reintroduction of serious punitive prison regimes, plus putting the police back on preventive foot patrol. But that would never do in the liberal world of David Cameron.

So instead sentences – even for rape – must get shorter and shorter until they almostentirely disappear.

It won’t work. Whatever this lot does, I promise you, the prisons will be crammed, with their revolving doors whizzing round fast enough to generate electricity.

Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly.

One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove.

One is when people ‘take the law into their own hands’, by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences.

Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape.

But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship.

It means one person’s word against another’s, in highly unequal circumstances, with the accuser granted anonymity and the accused under the glare of publicity.

Those who don’t think there’s anything wrong with this definition are quite entitled to their opinion. But they’re not entitled to shout down those who disagree with them. Even so, I bet they try to.

In full hijab, is Orla trying a bit too hard?

Here's the BBC’s very severe reporter Orla Guerin broadcasting from Pakistan after an atrocity.

Ms Guerin, who during her stint in Israel often seemed more like a prosecutor than a reporter, has adopted the full hijab or headscarf, completely covering her hair, plus a very, very long dress.

Is she trying too hard here? And if so, why? The BBC said it was a ‘conservative area’ but couldn’t provide any details of how it measured this. It also said other female reporters had done the same thing, but couldn’t, despite repeated requests, substantiate this.

I’m all in favour of showing respect to the culture where you are. But in this clip, Ms Guerin is speaking to camera and standing in front of a van, not conversing with some mullah stuck in the 14th Century.

Even the late Benazir Bhutto, who was Premier of Pakistan and needed to keep the imams happy, usually wore her headgear further back than this.

Now Gerry Adams can lay a wreath in Guildford

Following the Queen’s successful visit to the Irish Republic, I look forward to the day when President-of-all-Ireland Gerry Adams makes a state visit to London and lays wreaths at Harrods, in Hyde Park, outside the Old Bailey, in Bishopsgate and at Canary Wharf, and then heads out of town to do the same in Brighton, Deal, Warrington, Manchester, Guildford and Birmingham – and on the graves of Ross McWhirter and Ian Gow.

If he will wear a Union Jack tie, then I don’t see why an Army band can’t play Kevin Barry or some other rebel ditty while he lays his tributes.

As far as I am concerned the Irish people, almost all of them, are our friends, brothers and sisters, bound to us by many common causes, greatly enriching the culture and history of our two islands.

If I could undo the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, I would.

The obvious liking shown on both sides during the Queen’s visit is far more representative than the violent, undying hate of Sinn Fein.

Yet, behind all the smiles and generosity, Sinn Fein has been the ultimate winner in this conflict.

Lawrence retrial is a bad day for liberty

I am sorry but I cannot rejoice at the planned retrial of a suspect in the Stephen Lawrence murder case.

The rule against being tried twice for the same offence is a keystone of freedom. And to work, it has to be a rule, even when it breaks our hearts to obey it. For if it is not absolute, then one day a bad government will use this as a precedent to pursue and crush opponents. Why do we care so little about these great treasures of liberty? Perhaps we no longer deserve to have them.

**************************The head of the Armed Forces, General Sir David Richards, has been making political speeches, calling for more indiscriminate bombing of Libya.

This is not his job. He is also plumb wrong. We should abandon this daft ill-considered war before we get in any deeper.

**************************It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.

The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian’s allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way.

During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor.

Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians?

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22 November 2007 6:07 PM

Several responses: A question for those who repeatedly raise the fake parallel of illegal drugs and legal alcohol, and never, never answer my riposte to it though claiming to be unconvinced by that riposte. A small hint.

If you say you're unconvinced by an argument without explaining why, you're not playing according to the rules of this site, where proper argument is expected. Yes, that's you I'm talking about , "May du P'naim".

If you will not say why, then I'll have to assume that you don't have an answer, and are pig-headedly sticking to your position although you cannot reason in its defence. One, I am campaigning for the proper enforcement of an existing law. You appear to be campaigning either for its non-enforcement, or for its abolition. When you therefore claim to be so concerned about alcohol abuse, what is it that you propose?

That the laws against alcohol should be as strict as those against, say, heroin, and as strictly enforced as I would like them to be? No. You are really campaigning for the laws against narcotics to be as lax as the ones on alcohol. I suspect you don't actually care in the slightest what the alcohol laws are.

Your argument is wholly destructive, while appearing to be motivated by concern. In which case your argument is a hypocritical fake. You imply that, because we have failed to control alcohol, we should give up trying to control drugs. But you cover this up with a pretence that you are genuinely concerned about alcohol.

In fact, your attitude will ensure that both scourges are unleashed, unhindered, across society. Your argument is not merely inconsistent and wrong. It is actively fraudulent and designed to give the impression that you are concerned for others when you are in fact concerned only for yourselves, and your greasy pleasures.

By the way, I don't believe the argument that cannabis is a 'gateway' drug has been made here, and it certainly hasn't been deployed by me. I'm not convinced by it, and don't regard it as an important part of the debate.

My view is that cannabis is quite dangerous and nasty enough by itself. It may well be that its users move on to other drugs, though some doctors now reckon that the irreversible brain damage inflicted by cannabis is more terrifying than the often-reversible physical ravages of heroin and cocaine.

As for the assertion by "May" (I'm sorry if this is a real name. It just doesn't sound like one, hence the inverted commas) that "the majority of young people will be far [more] likely to first learn about the moral acceptability of drugtaking from the adults they see getting drunk around them.", I think this is dubious.

First, I doubt very much whether the middle-class teens who use cannabis have parents who get drunk, though I suspect that rather a lot of them have parents who either are or were cannabis users themselves. Secondly, the crucial step in taking an illegal drug is not the taking of the drug (cannabis is always taken to get high, alcohol can be drunk purely for taste or sociability) , but the decision to break the law by making the illicit purchase.

This is learned from a culture of public figures, commentators, teachers, adults, movie stars, celebs, etc, who openly take illegal drugs - and a culture of law-enforcement bodies which equally openly do nothing. Not, I think, from parents who have a few glasses of legal wine with their supper.

Alex Owen wonders why a law against the possession of illegal drugs should apply on private property. This is an interesting attitude to the law, apparently based on property and the market rather than on Christianity.

Well, it should apply there for the same reason that all other laws apply on private property. You can't get away with murder, assault, rape, robbery or fraud because you did it on your own land.

So why should you be allowed to possess a substance which has been ruled illegal by Parliament?

The importance of possession being a crime is simple. It is the only way in which the actual user can be prosecuted and punished. The apologists for the absurd 'war on drugs' (and several misguided readers of this blog) concentrate on the so-called 'evil dealers', who would not exist if there were no demand, and who laugh at the efforts of the authorities. What is the source of that demand?

Well, at least partly, powerful commercial advertising, and partly human weakness and folly, as in the case of most harmful products used on a large scale. Drugs have for decades had an active and persuasive advertising campaign, known as the rock music industry, and the endorsement of large numbers of celebrities, together with the near-endorsement of those who argue spuriously for their legalisation. Fear of punishment is the only serious counterweight to this in the minds of the impressionable ( and that's quite a lot of people). And that fear must apply everywhere to be effective.

Social and moral conservatism is not Tory anarchism. Likewise I am not an 'anti-statist', as the Adrian Mole Brothers have absurdly claimed. The state is necessary in any advanced society. The question is, how large and extensive and powerful it needs to be.

Also I seem to have spotted someone pointing out that Thatcherism may have played some role in the spread of drugs, as if this would somehow derail my argument. Are there still people out there who don't know I'm not a Thatcherite? Well, I'm not. And one reason is that I think the destruction of industrial employment for male breadwinners under the Thatcher government was a social as well as an economic mistake, and I am well aware of the heavy drug use in de-industrialised areas.

"Grant" mentions the famous period when heroin was available legally on prescription in this country. Well, so it was, and this arrangement was ended because some doctors abused it. But that was also an entirely different era in this country, before the rock industry had begun its relentless publicity campaign for drugs, and before the general collapse of parental and teacher authority and of the criminal justice system. It was also at a time when the use of heroin was universally regarded with horror and disgust, rather than romanticised and excused as it is now.

Grant adds "the evidence is that if the state provides them for nothing it reduces the number of addicts and the amount of crime committed by them.". To which I reply, where is this evidence, exactly? Please direct me to it, with full references. I should be interested to examine its figures and its methodology.

It would seem to me much more likely that if the taxpayer were to be forced to supply free heroin (advertised widely as it is) to every degenerate who chooses to poison himself in this way, the numbers of heroin abusers will increase exponentially as the word gets round. I imagine most of these people will also receive allowances for being incapacitated, even though they have incapacitated themselves.

Further, Grant argues "anyone who takes heroin is making a choice to inject something into their own body. What right do you have to send them to prison for this? You mention anti-social behaviour, but any anti-social behaviour caused by heroin is dwarfed by that caused by alcohol."

Well, I've repeatedly dealt with the alcohol red herring (see above), and await reasoned replies from 'Grant' or 'May' to what I've said. If 'Grant' gets his way, it won't be long before heroin is causing as much crime as booze. Anyway, I don't happen to think that people own themselves. As 'Grant' appositely asks "What do you say to the parents of addicts?". He suggests that those parents would prefer their children to inject themselves with poisonous muck in a clean environment.

Well, I don't think so. Given the choice, I am sure they want their children back from the drug culture altogether. They want them to stop, not to be helped to continue, in clean surroundings, to ruin their lives . Defeatists and appeasers may have helped fool them into the belief that it is hard to give up heroin. But once the untruth of this proposition is made clear, I am sure they would prefer total cessation.

Drugtakers, indeed all of us, owe debts to others, not least those who raised them and those who rely on them. My own view is that they also owe a duty to God, but I know this is baffling to some, so I simply mention it as a possibility to be considered seriously. By harming themselves in this way, they have multiple effects on others. They cruelly grieve anyone who loves them, almost beyond bearing. They become so arrogantly selfish in pursuit of their pleasure that they steal, very often from those closest to them, which is a specially hurtful form of crime.

And they believe that their 'habit' (which they could control but won't) excuses this stealing. A law which punishes possession severely, and so deters them from starting in the first place, is the best hope they have. It assumes that they are proper men and women with free will, rather than feeble creatures with none, and therefore helps them, become proper men and women(whereas the appeasement policy helps them to become and remain slaves). Applied in an exemplary fashion, a punitive, deterrent policy would save countless lives from ruin. Drugtaking is not a private act, any more than any man is an island, entire of himself.

Which brings me neatly to 'Steve B' , who chides me for lack of Christian charity, saying:. "Goodwill to all men, love thy neighbour etc - except those souls ravaged by heroin addiction who should be flayed alive and kept out of my sight, thank you very much." And "It is my contention that human beings - yes, even ones who have repeatedly broken the law and made a choice to use an illegal poison - should not simply be flung aside out of our comfy suburban sights to rot." Something similar comes form Nisa Tanin, though more temperately: "Describing these people with broken lives and minds as mere junkies to spit on and to isolate is only a denial of their existence in the far fringes of society. Although you make some valid points I am left slightly disturbed by the tone and attitude of utter contempt in your article and believe that some compassion would not go amiss. Not every 'junky' is a monster. Many of them have got to where they are through terrible events in their lives"

Well, first of all nobody has talked about flaying, rotting, spitting on or flinging aside. As for being out of sight, or isolated, the sort of sentences I envisage would have the ex-junkies back on the streets quite quickly, not least so that they could spread the word of how very unpleasant it was to be inside. Prisons in my view should be places of austere discipline, loss of status and privilege, removal of comfort and distraction, and plentiful hard work, and also of short sentences fully served. But they should not be places of neglect, abuse or cruelty, and are actually less likely to be abusive or cruel or neglectful if they are run as I suggest than if they are run as they are now.

You have a strange idea of Christianity (excusable, I suppose, if all you have seen is ranks of sweet old ladies singing hymns in 'Songs of Praise', and have had no education in the Scriptures). Christ was very tender to repentant sinners, but very hard on the unrepentant ones, who face weeping, gnashing of teeth and outer darkness in a large number of parables.

The deliberate throwing away of your own life by the taking of drugs is plainly, in Christian terms, wrong. It is a form of suicide, and the crimes which drugtakers commit against others, in the pursuit of their selfish pleasure, are also deeply wrong under all known moral codes. The Christian wishes to help people to stop behaving in this way.

And the question here is, who is really helping these people?

The ones who indulge the heroin taker, who cheerfully supply him with what is in effect a slow-motion suicide kit, who assist him in his false belief that he has no choice, who treat him as if he is a weakling who cannot cope without a drug, who accept his feeble, nonsequitur excuses for his state? (Many people undergo terrible experiences. Most do not respond by becoming heroin users. Therefore the excuse that a heroin user has undergone terrible experiences is not valid, any more than the excuse that someone is poor is not a valid one for acts of theft). Or those who say"Do this, and you will be punished so hard that you will never want to do it again"?

Obviously, to make this work, you would need to have a period during which exemplary punishment was convincingly meted out. But I do not expect it would last very long before the message got through, and drug abuse fell. Our society has for years adopted the first course of action. What has happened? The number of drug abusers has visibly grown and grown. This would seem to me to suggest that,if you seriously want to help people not take drugs, sympathy is the last thing you should deploy.

A similar realisation now grips those charities which deal with the misnamed 'homeless', whose problems are not lack of housing but lack of stable families and fathers. These charities now spend much effort rightly urging us not to give these people money, which will only be spent on drugs and drink, but to give it instead to the charities, who will try to get them off the streets.

So the Christian may have to pass by the beggar and refuse to give to him, if he truly wishes to help him. It may look unChristian to do so. But I don't think it is. Likewise, I have no doubt that the threat of severe punishment would save many young lives from ruin by drugs of all kind, and long for this to be tried before more of those lives are wrecked.

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20 November 2007 9:54 AM

My headline for this article is taken from the BBC website, which uses precisely this phrase to trumpet its account of a scheme to give heroin 'addicts' free supplies of their illegal drug at the expense of honest, law-abiding, hard-working people. This is, in part, a replacement of the utterly useless and positively harmful Methadone programme, the state's previous exercise in total moral vacuity and feebleness in the face of the drug menace. Don't let that blind you to how nasty this development is in its own right.

The story was featured triumphally on Monday's 'Today' programme on BBC Radio 4, and - while I was listening - there wasn't a critical voice to be heard. It was even said that it would be 'funded' by the Home Office and the Health Department, the usual BBC misunderstanding of where the state's money comes from. Actually it is paid for by you and me, and - if we don't stop it - there will be more and more of this, gobbling up piles of our money on subsidising sloth and self-inflicted harm.

May I digress a moment here? I see that there is to be a sort of study of BBC impartiality by the BBC Trust. But it will look at network coverage during elections. This misses the point so completely it is hard to know what to say. Nobody has ever seriously accused the BBC of open bias towards one party or the other at election time. Elections are the one time when the BBC attempts to be wholly fair. The real BBC bias is in favour of the sexual revolution and against Christian morality, in favour of the permissive society in general, in favour of the EU, in favour of 'progressive' education policies, in favour of the relaxation of taboos, and of the breakdown of the rules of language. A recent example: on Monday a newsreader spoke in lovely Received Pronunciation tones of how Gordon Brown was about to 'commit to' something. This wasn't a mistake, but repeated an hour later. For anyone of my generation this was an ugly and illiterate misuse of a word. The verb 'commit', when linked to the preposition ‘to’ is reflexive and must be used with a reflexive pronoun. Without the preposition, in its non-reflexive form, it is used only for rather ugly purposes, to commit a crime, murder or suicide. Why should this change? Is the new form easier on the ear? Easier to understand? Or just lazy, sloppy, ugly and unnecessary, and just the sort of thing a high-standard national broadcaster should be committed to avoid (note, not 'should commit to')? Who or what is Mr Brown 'committing to' his goal? Shouldn't we know? Is it himself? Is it us, is it his wretched party? Is it just a lot of our money? The new form is less clear, less truthful than the old. Perhaps that is why it is becoming part of New Labour Newspeak.

These moral and cultural divisions are not party issues, though for a while a segment of the Tory Party was associated with morally, socially and linguistically conservative ideas, and - as a direct result - the BBC treated the Tory Party as if it were a convicted criminal. Now the Tories have purged themselves of all trace of socially and morally conservative thought, they are treated incredibly fairly by the BBC. The change is so huge, it is shocking. In fact I regard it as news. BBC bulletins are crammed with generous, uncritical coverage of Cameron initiatives which, under another leader and three years ago, would have been ignored or mentioned only in the context of Labour's denunciation of them. This former link between the Tories and conservatism, now quite gone, is the reason why some people think the BBC bias is specifically anti-Tory.

But back to the illegal drugs, freely distributed to their illegal users by the state, using money extracted from you and me on pain of imprisonment. Plenty of paradoxes there, I should have thought. What has been going on, in London, Darlington and Brighton, is that users of the illegal drug Heroin have been given free supplies of this poison (which we officially loathe so much that we pretend we want to wipe out the Poppy fields of Afghanistan) by special state clinics, "under the supervision of a dedicated team of nurses and clinicians in a special but simply furnished room". They're open every day, too, which is more than can be said for quite a lot of police stations or GP surgeries.

I'm glad it's "simply furnished", aren't you? It would be so much harder to bear if the place were done out in heavy carved mahogany and rich carpets. All "addicts" must wash their hands" before taking their heroin. How nice. There are cupboards for 'storage', presumably a place for the junkies to keep their "equipment". Are they required to keep that clean, too? It isn't stated.

"Compared with the kinds of places where some addicts take their drugs", trills the BBC website "this is a different, clinical world".Well, I should think it would be, given what we have spent on making it so. But why should it exist at all? So far as I understand it, the possession and sale of Heroin is against the law. So why is it legal for the state to give it to these self-confirmed criminals? I am particularly struck by this because, a few years ago, a relative of mine was dying in some pain in an NHS hospital. Doctors were initially reluctant to give her enough morphine (the same thing as Heroin) for fear that she might become addicted. The idea that this devout Edwardian Christian, a dedicated lifelong nurse who accompanied the allied armies through Europe after D-Day, would become addicted to morphine in her final days was beyond laughable. But it was seriously advanced.

Yet, when these self-destructive morons are involved, a smiling official, no doubt addressing them all matily by their Christian names and asking them how they are, hands them a whopping dose of a drug they take for pleasure, without any fuss at all.

Several of these parasites are quoted, approving warmly of the scheme (and why shouldn't they?).”Christine" says her days on 'street drugs' were fraught with risk. "You got to go to places, certain housing estates and certain areas that are not exactly nice places to go", she recalls - and just think how bad they must have been for a junkie to think they weren't nice. I wonder what the inhabitants of these parts of town thought of Christine, as she loomed gauntly among the lamp-posts, looking for her fix? Imagine the charming domestic scene as the children observe her progress: "Mum, mum, that junkie's hanging around the bus shelter again!”

"You are at risk of being mugged", she goes on "or being sold rubbish by other addicts". Well, I never, what a shock, and nobody ever warned you that taking heroin was a bad idea, did they, Christine? No doubt she herself was never guilty of stealing or defrauding her fellow junkies, but it is quite common among such people, isn't it? By the way, can we dispense with this term "stealing to feed their habit", (which crops up predictably in the BBC report, as if a 'drug habit' were a large and demanding pet that would eat you alive if you didn't feed it, rather than a chosen path in life)? The words imply that in some way a drug habit, though chosen by the drug taker, excuses or explains the filthy act of theft, or that it is compulsive and beyond control. Can we substitute "he (or she) was so determined to enjoy his (or her) selfish drug that he (or she) stole money from weak and vulnerable people, to pay for it"?

Another of these victims of his own stupid selfishness, "Gary", managed to infect himself with Hepatitis C while pumping Heroin into his bloodstream. Again, what a surprise that must have been, when the diagnosis came through. There have been quite a lot of warnings about this. You might as well complain that you bleed after cutting yourself. Having been cured of this self-inflicted disease, no doubt at enormous expense by the NHS, "Gary" whines that his treatment was conditional on him joining the scheme, one of the few reassuring facts in this mass of folly and weakness.

He has the nerve to complain: “Just because I am addicted to one of the most addictive substances on the planet am I to be written off as a human being and not get any respect from the Health Service?" Diddums, "Gary". What would you say to someone who repeatedly drove his car into the sides of buildings at speed, and was told that, unless he changed his ways, the NHS would stop patching him up afterwards? I've argued elsewhere that Heroin is a lot easier to get off than is generally believed. But even if you don't agree with me about that, you have to admit that you don't just 'catch' a heroin habit by being on the same bus as an 'addict', do you? You have to seek out the nasty people who sell it, often themselves very bad advertisements for the druggy lifestyle, you have to buy the gruesome paraphernalia with which to force it into your bloodstream, you then have to go through a number of rather repellent procedures. And then you have to do it again and again and again before you can be sure you're a properly habitual user. And all the time, you know that it is wrong, and against the law. Forgive me if I haven't any sympathy left to spare for you, what with all the other bad things going on in the world, where people are miserable and ill through no fault of their own.

Or do you really know that it's wrong and illegal? That's the trouble, isn't it? Rock stars get away with it. They even promote it in their songs. Celebs get away with it. Fashionable authors and journalists get away with it. And the law is not enforced, and then you find that on top of all that, the dear old taxpayer is actually providing it for you free, in a clean but "simply furnished" room with a nice cupboard where you can keep your needle, your spoon and your tourniquet. So you conclude, quite reasonably, that they don't really mean that stuff about it being illegal at all.

This scheme will, in the end, result in more people taking heroin, not less. That is why it should be scrapped, now. The proper place for people who possess heroin is prison, the proper cure, punishment so bad they won't want to come back, and hard, hard work. This is the 'war against drugs' that has never been tried. I hate to think how many lives have already been ruined (and I am thinking of the relatives and victims of drug takers, just as much of the users themselves) because we haven't the moral guts to fight it.